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Sarah Kane's 4.48 Psychosis
"Everything passes/Everything perishes/Everything palls" – 4.48 Psychosis
How on earth do you award aesthetic points to a 75-minute suicide note? The question comes from a review of 4.48 Psychosis’ inaugural production, the year after Sarah Kane took her own life, but this book explores the ways in which it misses the point. Kane’s final play is much more than a bizarre farewell to mortality. It’s a work best understood by approaching it first and foremost as theatre – as a singular component in a theatrical assemblage of bodies, voices, light and energy. The play finds an unexpectedly close fit in the established traditions of modern drama and the practices of postdramatic theatre.
Glenn D’Cruz explores this theatrical angle through a number of exemplary professional and student productions with a focus on the staging of the play by the Belarus Free Theatre (2005) and Melbourne’s Red Stitch Theatre (2007).
How on earth do you award aesthetic points to a 75-minute suicide note? The question comes from a review of 4.48 Psychosis’ inaugural production, the year after Sarah Kane took her own life, but this book explores the ways in which it misses the point. Kane’s final play is much more than a bizarre farewell to mortality. It’s a work best understood by approaching it first and foremost as theatre – as a singular component in a theatrical assemblage of bodies, voices, light and energy. The play finds an unexpectedly close fit in the established traditions of modern drama and the practices of postdramatic theatre.
Glenn D’Cruz explores this theatrical angle through a number of exemplary professional and student productions with a focus on the staging of the play by the Belarus Free Theatre (2005) and Melbourne’s Red Stitch Theatre (2007).
100 pages, Kindle Edition
Published February 7, 2018
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May 7, 2020
“In short, mortality is love’s primary condition of possibility. We can only value the life of another person because it is finite... you can only love what you can lose.”
“I destroy because for me everything that proceeds from reason is untrustworthy. I believe only in the evidence of what stirs in my marrow, not in the evidence of what addresses itself to my reason.”
“Depression is grief out of proportion to circumstance. It is tumbleweed distress that thrives on thin air, growing despite its detachment from the nourishing earth. It can be described only in metaphor and allegory.”
“At any point in a love relation, the beloved can and must be able to say ‘I love you not’. If this is not the case, then love is reduced to coercive control, contractual obligation and command.”
“I destroy because for me everything that proceeds from reason is untrustworthy. I believe only in the evidence of what stirs in my marrow, not in the evidence of what addresses itself to my reason.”
“Depression is grief out of proportion to circumstance. It is tumbleweed distress that thrives on thin air, growing despite its detachment from the nourishing earth. It can be described only in metaphor and allegory.”
“At any point in a love relation, the beloved can and must be able to say ‘I love you not’. If this is not the case, then love is reduced to coercive control, contractual obligation and command.”
Displaying 1 of 1 review